The End of Sparta

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Wrinkled almost beyond recognition of being a Spartan hoplite, scarred, and bald, this monster stormed into the final killing, scoffed at the spears tips bobbing in his face, and tried to save his dying lord whom he had ridiculed the last nine years. His huge son Antikrates followed him, eager to outdo the father, and himself prepared to carry out both their corpses, if need be—father and king one on each shoulder. Lichas and his son were frantic. “Save the king! To the camp! All alive back to the camp! Eis to stratopedon. To me, rally to me!” Neither cared anything for the collapse of the Spartan ranks, much less the truth that the day of his parochial state was over. No, it was enough this day that they were Spartans—now in the joy of battle, with their grip on shield and spear, whether that be here in the north or far to the east. Lichas’s last son was with him. Good men lived—even if his other boy, Thôrax, was gasping now for breath, after Chiôn’s spear had torn apart the sinews of his neck behind the ear.

  Whether in the heyday of Spartan power or amid its twilight also counted for nothing. He was stalking proudly upright despite his age. If the Spartans were to lose, they would lose in the way of Leônidas and Lysander—and Lichas—killing as they protected their king with all blows to their front. The stabbing in this last battle grew fiercer still. But Lichas laughed as he heard the dying around him in vain begging the Kêres to pass them by, the vultures of death back above Mêlon and Chiôn. The black deities kept their wide distance from Lichas—lest such a man strike even these deathless ones a fatal blow. No, Lichas laughed, even Nyx, queen of her dark brood, fears my smell.

  Then, without missing a step, Lichas stepped toward the downed Chiôn’s chest and tried to spear his throat. The wounded slave rolled away as Theban spears covered him. Lichas moved on to finish off others less dangerous. But in that moment the slave stumbled somehow to his feet, bellowing, “Kill the king. Where is Kleombrotos?” Then he fell a third time to the ground, muttering as the battle raged past him.

  Lichas whirled to meet a challenger: He slammed his freed spear shaft with an upward flat stroke against the helmet of the onrushing Epaminondas himself. Before Epaminondas could recover from the blow and with his men swarm this killer, Lichas stooped down. With one fluid motion, more a god than human, he picked up his limp king, slung him over his back, and used his body as a shield to batter himself a way out back through what was left of the guard. Antikrates backed away, face to the enemy, as his father headed to camp. He was trying to warn all those Spartans alive to follow his father’s path. “We and our king are the way out. We are the way back. To camp. To the ditch. Eis taphron, phugete pros taphron.” They were aiming at an escape, perhaps back through the shattered circle and on right through the Sacred Band to the open country—slashing as they went. “Turn, Spartans. Turn back. Draw back from these stinking pigs. Apostrepesthe tôn suôn. They will not have our Kleombrotos. No Spartan king for their slop. Not today—not ever.”

  There were only two hundred Spartans alive in the circle who broke out with Lichas, as their bald hoplite god roared on, “Not today. Not ever. Not today, not ever—ou sêmera, oupote, ou sêmera, oupote.” They had been abandoned by their allies and were surrounded by the Boiotians. But the Spartan remnants were buoyed by the late appearance of their bloody Ares Lichas. He had always found a path out for them. Now his indomitable son Antikrates was his rearguard. The two would outdo each other for the laurels of battle. Both would clear a way for the rest to get out and home, or so the last of the Spartan hoplites thought.

  With Lichas leading, the Spartans remembered their training of the agôgê, and as if awakened from a trance they backpedaled in column. With Lichas, almost magically they wheeled around and plunged ahead through Pelopidas’s men to their rear—who had thought the battle long over. One man, a single god-like Lichas, was worth a lochos, or maybe more still than six hundred mere hoplites, and now he intended to save the best of those still alive for wars yet to come.

  Many of the Theban Band in the rear had already begun stripping the bodies. Fools again. Ten or so of them, the best hoplites in Thebes, were impaled by Lichas’s charge. Their ashes would soon send the big houses of the city into mourning for the year to come. Where this foul apparition came from, no one afterward knew. Perhaps some fissure in the earth had spat him back out from Hades below? Survivors claimed he had been on all sides of the battlefield, on and off his horse. That his neck and forearms were a bloody mess made him yell in delight, “The pigs bite us like children. Like children. They sting like wasps, no more.”

  Lichas stalked his way through the raining blows of the Thebans to the front of the retreating column. In disgust, with a quick overhand slam he sent his spear into the throat of Saugenes, the high officer of Pelopidas’s Sacred Band who stepped forward to block his passage. Like his dead father at Delion, Saugenes only earned himself another black marble grave stele on the road to Thebes for his trouble. Lichas, even under the weight of his king, was making headway with level Spartan spears at his front and side. Mêlon had bolted back up after ducking his blow, followed the retreating band, and picked up the fallen spear of the king. He tried to cast it in anger for the stabbing of Chiôn, but it was a heavy thing not meant for throwing. Mêlon was aiming at the body of the king, since he thought the limp Kleombrotos might have survived his head wound.

  Lichas turned and saw something out of the corner of his eye. He bobbed his head a little. The iron point of Mêlon’s throw only cut through the ear of the Spartan’s bare head before hitting the thigh of the king draped over the shoulders. Lichas’s shredded ear on the side of his unhelmeted head spurted blood. He ignored the scratch. “To the hill, to the hill and form up. A thousand in camp await us there. A thousand others and more live. Across the ditch and on home,” he roared. Kleombrotos was dead, having breathed his last even before Mêlon had thrown his spear. Now it fell from the king’s limp thigh. The bodyguards pressed even closer to Lichas and their slain lord. In moments the Spartans were through the crowd of Thebans. Now they were marching across the bridge over the ditch under a hail of missiles. The Boiotian light-armed ran up to get in their blows, once they had a clear fleeing target.

  Antikrates was last. With his massive shield, the son of Lichas brought up the rear. He was pushing the Spartans ahead. He waved his spear this way and that before throwing it at the Boiotians who had slowed in their pursuit. He took up a cleaver now. As his father rushed ahead into the camp, Antikrates turned about and paused, eager to kill one more Boiotian before he too was across the ditch—a sight to encourage his men who watched him cross.

  Ismenias, son of Ismenias, the firebrand of the Theban dêmos, had ordered his men not to let them away. “At them. Follow me across.” But Chiôn was now wounded and down. Mêlon, Epaminondas, and Pelopidas were wobbly and stunned. So Ismenias found himself far out in front of the pursuers, riffraff who waited for archers and javelin throwers to come up to pelt the retreating Spartans. Antikrates didn’t wait for the fool Ismenias to reach the bridge over the gully. Now he charged back out to give his swing more power. With a clean cut, Antikrates sent the head of Ismenias flying off and up, his helmet strapped tight, a half yell already out of his mouth: “No escape! Ou phugê!” Antikrates turned once again in scorn and lumbered toward the camp. He crossed. Then the Spartan knocked away the two boards across the ditch and joined his father.

  Lichas was already up on the rise of the Spartan camp where more than a thousand Spartan stragglers had found safety. They were forming up the phalanx to greet their rearguard. Lichas laid down his dead king carefully, strutting back and forth, smiling to the defeated Spartans. He was already making order among the mess and confusion of camp. It was better, he thought, that the king was dead, and now the better man, ephor Lichas, could take command and lead home what Kleombrotos had nearly ruined. Lichas commanded rank after rank of his survivors to kneel, shields down on the ground and spears resting on their knees. “Stay fast, my sons of Herakles. Stay fast. By our spear arms we get home
. I bring you all home. There are no tresantes here. Not one. Not one of us is a trembler.”

  The battle of Leuktra was over. It became legend for the widows at the looms in Thebes and the blind bards in the halls to work over. The larger war to end Sparta itself now began. Hundreds of Boiotian onlookers swarmed the battlefield and began to tear at the bodies of Kleonymos and the corpses of the royal guard. Then back on the killing field Mêlon himself stumbled to the ground, in exhaustion, right where he had toppled Kleombrotos, amid a pile of corpses, bloody capes, sandals, helmets, and entrails. He drifted off, and his eyes closed. He was once again under a better blue sky on his vineyard beneath Helikon, where he saw the good Gorgos of old, and two-armed Chiôn in the vineyard driving in stakes in the rocky ground, calling to him to bring the iron bar to make more holes down the row. Lophis was the overseer of all, barking orders to get the planting done before the great ice storm came from off Helikon. He was happy to linger with Nêto at a pond by the vines, gazing at the dark images of storm clouds piling on Helikon in the growing ripples of the water as Nêto bent over for an icy drink. Wind rustled in the oaks and the scent of cedar came with the breeze from the storm. In the air always was that pipe music, the playing of that goat tune of Epaminondas, or was it Nêto with the reed at her lips and her strain from Thisbê that loosened his limbs, that strain that always came to drive worry and care away?

  “Wake up, Thespian, you cannot cross over. Not yet.”

  It was the Stymphalian Ainias, the planner of Leuktra, who had sat down next to the son of Malgis. Throughout the entire battle the Arkadian had never been more than two files away in battle, always with Proxenos at his side batting away any thrusts aimed at Mêlon. Now from his wine sack Ainias poured some water into his bloody helmet. Then he beat away the flies that had covered Mêlon’s head and cleaned the wound.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Wages of Battle

  Mêlon’s head cleared a bit and the Thisbean music in it abruptly stopped—no more cedar scent in the air, no pond, no Nêto, no Chiôn, no family at work on the slopes of Helikon. The sun of the long day was speeding westward on its home leg toward the mountains. He blurted out to anyone nearby, “Good men. That is all that matters. We had them. Hoplites like Lophis, Chiôn, and Ainias and Epaminondas can do anything—good men, far better than anyone in the king’s army. Good men, that’s all that counts.”

  Now Mêlon went on with his ramble, “I paid Lichas back in kind. I think you will find something of his ear, and maybe of the king’s spear as well.” Mêlon vaguely sensed that Ainias was treating his wounds. For an eye blink, he thought it was Lichas back to finish him off—since this Ainias spoke Doric and was a rough-looking sort, a frightful thing to see as well on the battlefield, nearly as ugly a hoplite as Lichas himself. “Thespian. Your spear fell from the dead Kleombrotos, but only after your sword went into his head bone. Few hit a Spartan king. None twice. That spear—it will hang in the temple of Herakles at Thebes. Or perhaps the ekklêsia will vote to send it to Proxenos’s new Boiotian altar at Delphi.”

  Ainias was looking more carefully over Mêlon’s head wound, wondering whether the larger tear across his brow should be seared or stitched. “You are the only Boiotian who has ever drawn blood from Lichas. The prophetesses from the south say he is the favorite of their gods. These seers boast that even in his seventh decade that bald head cannot be killed by any Theban—or even perhaps any free man of Hellas. It is not easy to stand up to Spartan men in battle when they believe that the gods favor only the strong, and live and talk inside their chests.”

  A growing circle of hoplites neared the dazed and bleeding Mêlon, wishing to walk over the very soil where he had just spilled the blood of the king Kleombrotos. The Thespian’s arms and neck were laced with gashes and scrapes. Ainias, who knew well the nature of mending torn skin and stopping oozing blood, put a cream of honey and animal fat in the deeper gashes. He rubbed olive oil on the bleeding shallow cuts, and wrapped them in linen to keep away the flies and gnats. He counted out loud eleven spear slices. Mêlon’s armor showed another batch of new dents. The blow from Kleonymos to Mêlon’s head had closed an eye. Half his face was unrecognizable. Where, he wondered, was his son?

  Mêlon squinted back and at last weakly muttered, “Where is Lophis?” “Where is my Bora? At least go find the spear head at the trophê where the Spartans turned. The king’s guard of young Spartans nearly gored me. We fought from the left, Stymphalian. Just as you said. But their spears over that way were longer and sharper. Lichas was the better man. I know that now. He has a son as well—who is bigger yet. Antikrates is better still. And where is Lophis, where is our Chiôn to deal with these enemies.”

  “Wait until we know more. We are sure only that your sword first went into the mouth of Kleombrotos. The king is chewing on it in Hades. His henchman Lichas can thank you for another cut. It made him look even more the dogface than he was. Though he won’t miss an ear since they say Lichas listens to none anyway. You and Chiôn have sent the royal house of Sparta across the Styx. Think of it—the king dead, and with a sword no less, a sword wielded by a farmer on Helikon. Machairion I should call you. But here is what is left of your Bora. We keep it and make a new shaft this spring.”

  Ainias held up the huge iron tip with a broken shaft about an arm’s length left. A Tanagran had just found it near Chiôn. Mêlon was coming back for longer moments to his senses, “Where is my Lophis? Is he already at the gulf? Where Chiôn?” But there was no Chiôn to answer him. Mêlon finally began to fathom that his slave had toppled. “Chiôn? Did Lophis bring out his body?”

  “Proxenos was near you all the time. That’s his nature. The hard stone in a crisis. He was there right behind you. To steady you; so much for your Nêto’s warnings to him that he too would go down.” Ainias had spied a crowd around Chiôn with shouts that he lived. He also had forgotten that Nêto had warned Proxenos not of Leuktra, but of crossing the Isthmos in its aftermath. “It was Proxenos who saved your brute. Chiôn is warm, but whether he will live, I’m not sure. Your son was with the horse, and our riders routed them easily. No doubt he is far off, in the shadows of Kithairon riding down those who bolted.” Mêlon nodded at news of his son and that Chiôn breathed, thinking that he must have been asleep as Ainias had searched the pile of the dead. He hadn’t really thought that any Spartan could kill Chiôn.

  Mêlon was confused as Ainias finished, “Lichas’s spear cut into Chiôn well enough. But his bronze plate warded most of that hard blow away from his heart. The Plataian is sewing on him now, at least the smaller tear he cannot burn. They say he can patch flesh as well as build stones. Though I have healed more than he and I’ll go back there to check on the wound to make sure he has put in enough honey and wool. I don’t like thread. The hot poker is the only way to close a real tear. I brought my doctor box. I’ll need to take the bronze prong and scissors and cut away the bad skin, and pull out the splinters before we melt the wound closed. I may want to bleed him—and purge him too while I’m at it. Or maybe a leech or worm to eat away the rot to come.”

  By now, as Mêlon alternately slept and awoke, it was almost dark and the torches were lit. Epaminondas had himself re-formed a tiny phalanx a few hundred yards ahead and his men right in the dark were squared off against Lichas and the Spartan survivors on a nearby hill. But Mêlon’s head seemed caved in. The pounding of the waves roared in his ear. Bodies—he could see them in the twilight—were dragged and piled in heaps. The battlefield was becoming an agora as thousands of Boiotians crisscrossed the carnage. Who was that strange man in the long cloak over there? he thought. He stares here too long. An aged white-haired fellow crossed by, with a lanky, bleary-eyed attendant carrying off a corpse, a mess of a hoplite of forty or so from Thebes. There was a severed arm tied flat to his chest with twine, at least something like that under the flies. Are they afraid the dogs will get it? That must be the work of that Kleonymos, or maybe Antikrates, or so Mêlon thought.

 
; Ainias’s voice now kept Mêlon awake, as he muttered of this trio off in the distance, “There goes dead young Kalliphon, the orator and son of Alkidamas, the greatest speaker of the Hellenes, and the godhead behind the freedom of Messenia, tutor to Epaminondas himself. They all had no business out here. The man was no fighter. You can see from the sad look of the father and their thin slave from the north. That son Kalliphon’s first day in bronze was his last. His father and that sorry shield-carrier of his, they must burn him as they can. Though one is wrinkled and stiff and that other servant of his, a northerner with a half-Hellene tongue, thin and green.”

  Was this Alkidamas again? Why did he hear always of the mythical Alkidamas somewhere? Mêlon heard a familiar voice at his back, “You breathe still, my master. But you look dead to me.”

  Nêto.

  The Messenian girl put a cloak over the cold Mêlon. Now she poured him more warm water from her own pouch and swatted away the blue-black flies. But hadn’t he left her with Proxenos, just last dusk before the battle, with orders to start for home on the morning of the battle? He knew that he was not on the wrong side of the Styx. Or maybe this was Helikon, and he was working in the hot vineyard as his Nêto brought them his afternoon water from the spring above.